从我们呱呱坠地的那一刻起，我们的人生就被“故事”环绕着。
我们在故事中思考、在故事中学习、通过故事去了解世界的含义。故事引领人们探知未来，帮助人们发现自身的价值和意义。
那么，在这个被广告自动化、营销个人化的互联网世界里，作为营销者的我们又该如何讲述故事呢？
在如何讲故事这方面，我很欣赏IDEO亚太地区首席营销官、人性化设计公司PEBBO创始人陈博雅的理论：有效的故事需要同时顾及技巧（Craft）和角度（points of view）。前者需要营销者有效地调用其团队或机构成员的技术、经验、和创意天赋，后者要求营销者从听众的角度思考问题。营销者讲故事的最终目的，不是为别的，而是为了帮助观众更好地了解他们自己。
好的故事能带领听众走上一条重寻自身价值与抱负的道路。
由于故事的这些特质，品牌营销者可以巧用之而引共鸣。
“讲故事就像讲笑话一样，需要有明确点睛之笔，需要有结局。要明确，你所说的一切，从第一句到最后一句，都应该向着同一个目标去努力；并且，在理想情况下，还能够证实一个事实：即加深人们对于自己为何而存在的理解。我们都爱故事，这是与生俱来的偏爱。”
——安德鲁·斯坦顿，《玩具总动员》《机器总动员》电影制作人
因此，在“程序化营销”的广告时代，我们需要搭起科技与叙事之间的桥梁。如果一场营销只有技术作为支撑，那营销就丧失了“故事”这一重要部分。程序化购买不仅仅是关于算法、数据、和机器学习的技术，更是关于“故事”的技术。
广告技术与讲故事不应该是一道只能二选一的单选题，而应该相辅相成、相得益彰的两体。
互联网时代讲故事：
网络视频是最佳载体
电视和电影是故事的始祖。视频自然而然成为了讲述故事的最佳载体：它使听众身临其中，产生共鸣。
这就是视频的力量。
中国的互联网上，人们每天都在讲述、聆听、分享成千上万的故事。广告主们也立马跟上潮流。在美国，广告主支付的网络广告费用将在2017年首次超越电视广告费用。在中国，网络广告的霸主地位早在2015年就建立起来了。网络电视即将代替电视，成为最受广告主欢迎的广告媒介平台。
中国的意见领袖与视频媒介
一个中国网民大概有30%的网络时间都花费在网络视频上。因此，对好故事的市场需求是极其庞大的。中国网民对视频的疯狂热爱使得网络视频成为许多网红的跳板：Papi酱、易小星、张全蛋、莫小奇……他们都通过网络视频一举成名，赢得一大票粉丝。在广告界，我们称这些人为“意见领袖”(Key Opinion Leaders)。
随着网络直播、网红文化、社交视频平台如哔哩哔哩的迅速发展，故事讲述的本质逐渐从被动过渡为为主动，从单方面输出演变成双方互动的过程。这种转变很快反应到了商业中：64%的营销者表示，他们把网络视频看作未来营销的首选媒介。
选择好的故事
一旦广告主挑选好了广告媒介，接下来的一步就是探索如何有效地讲述故事。
《玩具总动员》和《机器人总动员》的编导安德鲁·斯坦顿在TED演讲中表示，有效地讲故事要求叙述者采用“2 2统一理论”。
“让观众自己把东西拼起来。不要给他们一个4 ，而给他们2 2 。你们提供的元素和其排列顺序，对决定你是否能够成功地与观众互动起着至关重要的作用。……正是这潜移默化的运用，牢牢抓住了我们的对故事的注意力。“
讲好一个故事的核心是引起观众的好奇心。不要一开始就全盘托出，而要娓娓道来。
我们都喜欢追逐的过程。这是天性使然。这就是为什么前辈总是告诫年轻人，不能在第一次约会时就求婚的，因为那样就丧失了追逐的乐趣。但是营销者常常只有15-30秒的时间来向观众讲述一个故事。如何能够在短时间内达到娓娓道来的效果呢？
程序化购买可以从两个方面帮助我们成为好的故事叙述着：
1. 连环叙述法
2. 频率控制
连环叙述法通过一系列短片的形式来讲述一个完整的故事，使得听众每一次都意犹未尽，如同等待下一集电视剧的时候，翘首以盼。
对于品牌来说，连环叙述法可以帮助听众在不同情景中了解品牌优势。
营销者应如《格林童话》中的《奇幻森林历险记》中的汉斯和格瑞特一样，一路撒面包屑，引领听众往前走。当他们有一天在日常生活中发现需要你所销售的产品时，这段“引导”就算圆满完成了。
通过不断向公众强调销售产品的优势、在不同平台上对同一用户进行再推广，营销者可以讲出最具有效率的故事。
因此，在讲故事的理论中2 2>4。
在不同平台上的营销
如今，每一个用户都拥有多个平台，而营销者必须为此作出相应改变。我们的技术精英与合作伙伴以大化小、层层攻克，研发出可以在多个平台上最终用户的技术。拥有跨平台追踪技术后，营销者就可以控制给客户推送广告的效率。
讲故事的角度
一千个读者就有一千个哈姆雷特。一个广告，不同听众也会有一千种理解方式。
如果营销者能够从听众的角度思考问题、讲一则广告则要以听众最喜欢的方式讲出来。
运用创意化广告
互联网时代带来的一个独特机遇便是大数据。营销者可以利用大数据来来了解用户心理，我们可以针对用户的地理属性将用户分群，并且以此定制专属于此用户的信息。
比如说，通过抓取用户过往浏览记录的数据，用户A被贴上“30-40年龄段”“家庭”等标签，动态创意广告技术将制定出一则主题是“家庭和睦”的广告，如“全面满足中国家庭需求“。如果用户B被贴上“20-30年龄段”人群，那么呈现在用户B面前的可能就是“多用途智能便携设备支架”的广告。
这种个性化的广告方式所带来的效果是显著的：点击率达到了预期的5倍之多。这就是个性化广告的力量。
一体化策略
假设广告主已经将最合适的广告投放给最合适的人群了。广告主的故事就讲完了吗？
想讲出有影响力的故事，就意味着故事讲述者必须凌驾于故事之上，专注于故事而不局限于故事本身。对于广告营销来手，这就意味着广告主应该预知到故事的“下一步”：用户体验。通过对用户反馈数据的调查分析，广告主可以找不同故事版本中最有效、反响最好的版本。
一个良好的广告科技公司懂得及时内省，在一个营销活动之后分析效果数据，从而知道在下一次营销活动时应该注意点什么。而一个杰出的广告科技公司则会边做营销边监测数据。 两者不应该是一先一后的顺序，而该是齐头并进的关系。
如果广告主在营销之后才去关注效果数据，那么即使发现了问题，也只能在下一次营销活动中改进。实时监测效果数据却能带来飞跃性的改变。如果发现了可以改进的地方，广告主可以立刻在本次营销活动中改变推送的广告、调整推送的频率、更改落地页，争取利用现有的每一分资源。
讲故事的力量
故事的力量是强大的。而当今，不同的故事种类和辅助故事的工具更是使得故事可带的创意性和表现性大大增加。
通过连环故事法，叙述者可以将故事的潜力发展到最大。技术可以通过将创意广告投放给目标人群，从而将广告的影响力最大化、提升用户对品牌的体验。
连环故事法虽然听起来有着不切实际的益处，但研究表明，连环故事法最终可以使得听着对品牌的印象加深，为品牌带来实际效益。
聪明的广告主懂得讲故事的技巧。好的故事不仅仅能传递出一个有力的信息，更能将用户体验一并优化。传统广告行业的故事叙述与现代互联网科技并非水火不容；相反，广告主应该将科技与故事叙述结合起来，在合适的时机、合适的场合、为合适的目标人群发出合适的广告。
以下为作者投稿英文原版
From the day we’re born, we’re brought up withstories.
It’s through stories that we imagine, learn, andunderstand the meaning behind the world. Stories help people experience what weare yet to experience and help them understand their identities, their ownvalues, and their meanings.
So in a world of automated advertising, personalisedmarketing, and big data-driven advertising, how has this changed how we cantell stories?
When considering storytelling, I’ve borrowed a conceptfrom Albert Chen,formerly IDEO and now founder of Pebbo a Human Centered Design firm.
Foreffective storytelling,it requires Craft, from leveraging theskills,experience and creative talent of your teams (or agencies) and points of view, as stories have meaning that helpthe audience understand who they are, so foreffective storytelling we need to consider addressing different points of view.
Storytelling
Storieshelp take people on a journey leading them to a place that reaffirms themselvesand their meaning and aspirations in life.
It’sthese traits of storytelling that make it such a powerful tool for brands andmarketers and help drive resonance with the audiences that hear them.
Storytelling isknowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you’re saying,from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideallyconfirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as humanbeings. We all love stories. We’re born for them.
~Andrew Stanton, thestoryteller behind Toy Story and Wall-E
Soin an age of “programmatic marketing” the gap between technology and storytellingmust be bridged. With marketing only powered by technology, we lose theheart of storyelling. Programmatic should not just be about algorithms, data,and machine learning.
Ratherthan trying to replace storytelling, ad tech should embrace storytelling.
With TV (and ultimately film) being the fathers ofstorytelling, video has a legacy as a medium that immerses audiences and allowsthem to experience the story that is being told and truly come along thejourney.
This is the power of video.
In China, millions of stories are being watched,listened to, and shared everyday online, with advertising spending following suit.
Whilst the US expects digital advertising to surpasstraditional TV spending by 2017, in China we’ve seen this shift fromtraditional TV to OTV channels happen faster with digital ad spendingout-spending TV since in 2015 solidifying its position as the most popularadvertising medium with 51% of media spend (vs 36% in the US).
Chinese Social Storytellers
With online vide commanding 30% of time of the averageChinese Netizen, there truly is a huge consumers demand for stories. Chinesenetizens’ craze for online videos has made them springboards for many keyopinion leaders (KOLs), such as Papi Jiang, Yi Xiaoxing, Quandan Zhang, andXiaoqi Mo. All of them won their first group of loyal fans by making hilariousand quirky online videos for the public.
With the growth of live-streaming, rapid rise of theKOL’s in China, and new social video platforms for the youth like bilibili,these new mediums have continue to drive this format from being a passive to aninteractive form of storytelling.
With this in mind, marketers are catching up, with 64% of marketers expecting video to dominate theirstrategies in the near future.
So once advertisers have chosen their medium, the nextstep is to figure out how to tell a story in the most effective way.
In a TEDtalk by Andrew Stanton, the storyteller behind Toy-Story and Wall-E,he introduces how to tell effective stories with The Unifying Theory of Two PlusTwo.
“Make theaudience put things together. Don’t give them four, give them two plus two. Theelements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether yousucceed or fail at engaging the audience… It’s the invisible application thatholds our attention to story.
The secret to crafting a good story is by feeding theaudiences natural desire to problem solve and to deduce and deduct. Don’t givethe audience the whole story all at once.
As humans we enjoy the satisfaction of the chase – wecan’t imagine proposing on the first date, yet as marketers we find ourselvestoo often fighting to deliver our message in just 15 or 30 secs (on pre-rollvideo).
With this in mind, how we can we leverage the power ofprogrammatic to help us become better storytellers (and marketers)?
There are two key ways programmatic can help:
Sequential Storytelling
Sequential storytelling enables a user to see a seriesof ‘stories’ in a given order, enabling the user to see ‘episodes’ that helpthem take them through a journey.
As a creative, this provides new opportunities to putyour imagination to work to rethink brand stories you wish to tell that worktogether, not just alone as singular creatives.
For a brands story, this might be helping your userunderstand the different brand benefits and help educate the audience. It canhelp lead the user to appreciate the different scenarios and use cases thatreinforce the need.
Like Hansel andGretel, we leave a trail bread crumbs of both the brand and product benefitsthat lead the way home – and allow the audience to revel in the satisfaction ofthe aha moment when they find the relevance of your product in their everydaylife.
By reinforcing the brand benefits and remarketing tothese audiences across other media channels, brands can drive stories thatperform.
Sequential telling is effective because it reinforcesthe brand messages to customers in a good experience for the audience. Tellinga story piece by piece is more effective than overwhelming the audience all atonce and helps unlock that natural curiosity.
Sometimes, 2 2 > 4
Delivering Reach withCross-device
Users now live simultaneously and seamlessly acrossplatforms and devices – so as a marketer we need to navigate this newenvironment.
In this fragmented world, we’ve brought together thebrightest technical minds and work with leading partners to break down thosesilos to leverage cross-device technologies that help identify one user acrossmultiple devices.
By understanding multiple devices belong to the oneuser, it means you can understand and limiting the frequency by which they seeyour advertising.
Why is this important? As it provides a better userexperience than being shown the same ads in addition to delivering bettereffective reach by ensuring your advertising spend is spread across a largeraudience base.
There are a thousand ways to interpret the same story- and the same goes for brands. Brands have a core message but the audience canhave different interpretations.
Powerful stories confirm a truth that deepens ourunderstandings of who we are as human beings. Different people, discoverdifferent truths.
By understanding the audience from his or her point ofview, you can tailor their own stories and use cases. In this way, eachaudience hears the right message that delivers the best brand resonance bycommunicating what matters most to them.
Leveraging dynamic creatives
The beauty in the opportunity today, is we canunderstand those different perspectives through data, and we have theopportunity to craft and deliver the messages that will resonate most.
By working with data partners we can identify thedifferent audience demographics with distinct segments and then throughtechnology we can tailor our stories in ways we never could before.
Via the audience segments, user A could be defined as“30-50yrs” and “family’ based on cookies of the users’ browsing history,and Dynamic Creatives technology can select a video creative themed with thekey USP for the family segment, such as larger boot space for an automotivemanufacturer. Additionally, if user B is identified as a youth segment personaged “20-30yrs,” the dynamic creative technology can select a creativehighlighting the “sports mode” for user B.
By leveraging the point-of view and perspectivestory-telling, the result was revealing: actual CTR (click-through rate) hit 5times of the expected figure. This is the power of finding the right audienceand delivering customized messages.
So now, advertisers have delivered the right ad to theright audience at the right place – does the story end here?
To deliver a story that performs – means looking pastthe advertising story to understand the users next step, and ultimately theuser journey. By measuring across both the advertising journey and sitejourney, we can understand the insights that enable us to identify the storiesand journeys that resonate most.
Understandingly this is ultimately what delivers thebest performance and is what is unique about our own story.
Whilst a good ad tech platform tracks performancestatistics after the marketing campaign so that it knowswhat could have been done better. But a great ad tech platform tracks data during the campaign.
Unlike post-campaign analysis, by measuring inrelatime enables you to be action-oriented. Post-campaign analysis provides wisdomafter the event; but nothing could be done on this given campaign as thecampaign is over.
However with real-time insights, advertisers to takeactions immediately and modify their campaign strategies, ad creatives and evenlanding pages.
By tracking impressions and clicks, and bounce rate,it constantly refreshes our understanding of the audience; monitoring adtraffic and channel performance and optimisation from the stories you tell.
Whilst we were brought up with stories since the daywe were born – the types of stories and tools available to us have given usmore opportunities for both creativity and performance than ever before.
By levearging sequential story-telling, you can helpleverage the power of stories to their full potential. The technologies nowavailable can enhance and preserve the impact of your ads and by deliveringfresh content and creatives to a tailored audience, which in turn improves theaudiences experience with your brand.
Whilst this might sound like a fairytale, researchshows sequential story-telling ultimately leads to better brand recall andconversion uplift and is a powerful tool for brands to leverage.
All in all, as the pages turn on the old mode ofadvertising continue to turn, advertisers should leverage storytelling that notonly delivers a powerful message, but can stand out to the audience and crossthe user journey from exposure to purchase. Smart advertisers marry ad techwith storytelling: ad tech assists advertisers to tell a story to the rightaudience in the right way at the right platform.
Rather than trying to replace storytellingwith technology, the best marketers will embrace technologiesand enable a new chapter of stories to be told.
文 ? Mahdi Shariff
来源 ? Morketing（ID：Morketing）
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